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362

EXPOSURE OF SELF-ELECTED COUNCILS.

of a new council by popular voting. It was one of those deviations into simplicity which are to be joyfully proclaimed whenever high statesmen commit them. The Liberals pounced upon the precedent; the lovers of close rule hastened to snatch it away; the authorities were shamed out of the inadvertence. The claim to popular election of a town council might have furnished employment for two or three generations of pamphleteers and advocates. But the Committee of the Commons sent for Scotsmen to be examined. There were four burghs whose money matters were in disorder. Their delegates were subjected to questioning. Insolvency was proved. An insolvent council resigned. Here was that kind of scandal which is not easily forgotten in Britain, and the self-elected oligarchies never got over this exposure. A few years afterwards a merchant company in Leith, whose members were devoted to the Dundas connection, quarrelled with the town council of Edinburgh, which managed all the docks of the suburb. Modern shrewdness contrived a joint-stock company to take the docks out of the council's hands without giving them to the upstart merchants of Leith; but it was found out by one of the few Scottish members of Parliament who were not Tories that the new joint-stock company included councillors who had given themselves shares. So here was another scandal; and Parliament, though not reformed, was too virtuous to bear with it. Mr. Abercromby, who had thrown light on this job, was in 1833 within a year of admission into the Whig Ministry;

ACTS OF BURGH REFORM.

363

and the fruit of burgh reform was ripe and dangling within reach.

This reform was analogous to the reform of the House of Commons. The House of Commons had always been in some measure constituted by local popular suffrage. The burghs had not wholly lost it; nomination had not wholly prevailed in the one system, nor self-election in the other. In Edinburgh there had been, out of thirty-three seats, not less than fourteen filled every year by deacons freely chosen by their several crafts. The two Acts of Burgh Reform, one of which covered the sixty royal burghs, the other made burghs out of sundry new towns, such as Leith, gave the municipal suffrage to all householders who paid at least ten pounds a year for occupying, or held tenements of their own rated at no less than ten pounds a year. The coincidence of the two suffrages, the parliamentary and the municipal, made things simple; and the annual voting tended to educate men for the rarer and harder duty of choosing members of Parliament.

A Tory cried out that a city, with its religion, its education, its art and taste, was given up to a mob of ten-pounders,' as if there were no householders who were rated above ten pounds. This mistake was a bit of the coarse and impetuous thinking which was then in fashion amongst Tory writers. Their thoughts had a general flavour of convivial emphasis. Yet they were right if they meant that the powers of the civic government should have been restricted; for it is hard to form by any suffrage a body of thirty

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townsmen competent to regulate an university or to appoint preachers.

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The ten-pounders' behaved as well in electing town councillors as in electing members of Parliament. They voted for persons of sufficient station; indeed, it was observed with some surprise that the new councillors were richer than their predecessors. The experiment was so satisfactory as to encourage a similar reform of municipal corporations in South Britain. But for this project it was necessary to collect knowledge of details. The English towns had not been, like the Scottish towns, exhibiting their infirmities in courts of law; and to dissect them was a task suited to a Commission of Inquiry appointed by the Government.

XLVI.

ROYAL Commissions, appointed by the Crown in virtue of the prerogative, may be, but seldom are, executive. To give a commission executive powers prerogative is in modern times hardly sufficient. Though an old Crown office may be, without consulting Parliament, 'placed in commission,' a new office, with power to make ordinances, generally requires an Act of Parliament to constitute it.

Distinct from these creatures of the legislature are those commissions which only inquire, report, and advise. Even these are so far subject to the House of

PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEES.

365

Commons that their expenses are defrayed by a vote; and it is convenient to wait till the House has asked the Crown to appoint a commission. Either House of Parliament can procure information without applying to the Crown, by naming some of its own members to be a committee; and such a committee has ample authority for questioning Crown officers whether they are willing witnesses or not, whilst it is often attractive to people not in office who have something to say on the question that is considered. A committee is sometimes more efficient in getting evidence than a commission, but it has to struggle for the leisure hours of a single session, and it is likely to miss, or to hurry, some parts of its duty. A committee is valuable chiefly in so far as it is a critic, or a touchstone, for some permanent office or institution, not as a channel for conveying information to an administrative office which is called upon to frame new ordinances. Moreover, since it is bound to sit within a two minutes' walk or run of its mother, the House, a committee of the Commons cannot examine people amidst their neighbours, or gather the facts which concern this or that place; it cannot be itinerant or minutely inquisitive. A committee of the Peers is equally immovable, and it is too polite and too leisurely for practical investigations.

Therefore it has been found that for a complex set of facts, which may take two or three years to ascertain and to digest, it is expedient to employ Royal Commissioners, and to pay their expenses liberally, so that they may visit many towns, employ clerks and

366

AID SOUGHT FROM WITHOUT.

draughtsmen, and write an encyclopædia for the particular subject on which the Government may be obliged to propose legislation.

It is a marked feature of the years stamped with Earl Grey's name, that the Ministers employed assistants in planning reforms, with a sincere intention of acting on their advice, and also with despatch and eagerness. It looks as if they heartily enjoyed the opportunity of summoning to their aid many clever men who were not in Parliament or in office, of whom many were known to them, not as kinsmen or favourites, but as good citizens and good reasoners. From the commissions which they formed ministerial and oratorical persons were not excluded; a leaven of debate or of routine was not to be abhorred; but the spirit of these temporary bodies was the intellectual fervour of early manhood. Men braced by recent study of mathematics and of law, yet not so fresh from chambers as to seem bookish in the eyes of practical men, were admitted to an honourable share in the prelude of legislation long before they could earn those positions which give people irresistible claims. Such men were standing, when called to this work, at the point where the ways part, that lead towards practice in the law courts or towards the grooves of salaried duties. They touched with one hand the ancient machinery of forensic inquiry, with the other hand the new methods of inductive and experimental science. group of the very ablest men in London would not be able, under the procedure of a Commission of Inquiry, to get at the rights of a complicated 'case'

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